Our favorite artists are the Impressionists—Monet, Renoir, Degas and that crowd—who developed a new way of not only painting, but of looking at the world. The real pioneers of art, however, were the Cro-Magnon painters whose canvases were the cave walls and ceilings in the Dordogne. They painted by the light from reindeer fat lamps, in much the same way that Michelangelo used votive candles on the Sistine Chapel, to which their work has been compared. It’s said that Picasso, upon seeing the 17,000 year old paintings in 1940 exclaimed, “We have invented nothing.”
The paintings at Lascaux took the world by storm when they were opened to the public in 1948. By 1955 Lascaux had more than twelve hundred visitors a day and, unfortunately, they all exhaled. The heat, humidity, carbon dioxide and bacteria caused so much damage to the paintings that the cave was closed in 1963.
We visited Lascaux II, located 200 meters away from the original, ten years ago. Opened to the public in 1983, it is a true-to-life replica of the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery from Lascaux that took twelve years to complete.
As a kid, Chris was one of those whose exhalations damaged the original Lascaux, though he neither realized that or could truly appreciate what he was seeing. Rose had seen only National Geographic-type photos so we packed a picnic lunch and took a rainy, two-hour road trip to Dordogne for a visit.
Both Lascaux II and nearby Grotte de Rouffignac were closed for the season but luck was with us. We could visit a new replica of another part of Lascaux and it would be a new experience for all four of us. The Lascaux International Center for Parietal Art, “Lascaux IV,” opened in 2016, shortly after our visit to Lascaux II. The self-guided audio tour took us from the discovery of the cave by four teenagers in September, 1940, through a cave-like replica of one of the galleries and into a room with even more examples of art from the cave. The audio guide wasn’t as straight-forward as it could have been but it told the entire story. Unlike Lascaux II, photos are allowed in Lascaux IV and we took our share.
It just happened to be Chris’s birthday and he took us all out for sushi when we returned home. I can’t rave about the sushi in Bordeaux but it was a memorable day.